After
by marzoog
Summary: They have learned from each other that words can bring balm, can nurse the sting of learning how to live after their whole world has toppled on its knees, and only recently learned to stand again. ShirleyUna


**Disclaimer:** I'm so the ghost of LM Montgomery. Whoooo… ahhh….Or, you know, not.

_After the torchlight red on sweaty faces _

_After the frosty silence in the gardens _

_After the agony in stony places _

_The shouting and the crying _

_Prison and place and reverberation _

_Of thunder of spring over distant mountains _

_He who was living is now dead _

_We who were living are now dying _

_With a little patience_

**-TS Eliot, The Wasteland**

**O&O&O&**

The trees are quiet.

At some moments they whisper their secrets clandestinely, or seem to be laughing to the breeze of an esoteric joke. But their jolly old companion the wind has fled, and so they are silent. He does not feel akin the silence any longer.

Not after the clanging of the Piper's call.

Once, perhaps, before the aeroplanes' buzzing crawled up his ears, he liked the stillness of silence better than anything else. He doesn't quite remember how it felt. Now he is afraid of the silence. The dim roar of pain has not subsided, and he has theorized that if he is not in silence, the roar will not be as loud.

His misses his love of quiet like a child missing the sun on a rainy morning.

**O&O&O&**

It seems odd that there is a palpity in nothingness. That while white is called a color, it is really the absence of it. And perhaps that is what silence is. The white of sound.

For here there are no sounds, and yet there is a vortexed way of noise for all that. It is an insatiable thing, this lack of noise. It will dervishly trip in and out-Hecuba in Cassandra's nuptials for concubineage.

Gentle mortals find sadness in such loud noises, such blasts and explosions of decibels, that in this absence of noise they would say _calm_.

She finds it anything but.

**O&O&O&**

"You're out late." Her head shoots up like a vertical arrow.

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you," Shirley adds. "May I sit down?"

He starts to sit before she can mummer a faint "Yes."

Silence comes swiftly for a moment and holds them in its grip. His lips purse, thinking of talk as small as fern seeds that will not be offensive. But hating the need for it.

"So, how are you?" He finally asks gently. "I don't see much of you nowadays."

"I'm fine." She clutches her courage. "I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine." Did that actually come out of his mouth? Drat it all!

She wants to not answer. To flitter away down the pine needle path and push everyone away from her who gets that close, as she has. But the weight is getting so heavy, so costly, bogging her down into the depths of callousness.

Her lips flap brokenly as butterfly wings; the words are trying to come out, to come over the bridge of elongated silence.

"I….I…you see…" _I can't be like this anymore, _she thinks, "No, I don't suppose I do."

His hand swipes over her back in a way meant to comfort.

"Do you want to talk about it, Una?"

His voice is as gentle as lake water, and, all of a sudden, she longs to bled herself of this corpulent secret. And she knows it's time.

"It's just so….final. Death, I mean. So many men are dead, over there in Europe. So many lives that were just halted to a utter and complete stop. And I…I'm…I'm so grateful that Carl and Jerry came back whole. And you and Jem, too. But, sometimes, I just only wish so hard that Walter was here. You were his brother, so I know you feel his loss keenly, but I just…it just...feels like there's no future without him. You see, I've just always stared at him…from the first time I ever saw him at the train station, and I couldn't stop, and I just wanted so, so badly for him to…."

A sob tears the words to broken pieces in her throat.

"To what?" He queries with a curiosity able to kill a cat.

"To love me." She finishes her sad history on a noise halfway between a sob and sneeze, and drops her head unto her lap.

"I'm sorry," she mutters when her head finally comes up, "I sometimes feel there's something wrong with me, I can't seem to stop crying now. I haven't cried before about it."

"There's nothing wrong with you. You've held too much grief to yourself, that's all."

"I….thanks…" tears reappear in their journey down her cheekbones, this time partly in gratitude.

He can't take it any longer. He puts his hands on her arms, and draws her head onto his chest. He strokes her hair and murmurs.

"It's going to be alright."

She hears his words, and then lets them sink into her while under her cheek she can feel his heartbeat.

_It's going to be alright_.

**O&O&O&**

They have both been reborn from the ashes of trenches. His eyes have seen too much and her heart has felt too much, so together they can begin to the nurse their collective scar tissue. She can teach him to see, and he can teach her to feel.

They have learned from each other that words can bring balm, can nurse the sting of learning how to live after their whole world has toppled on its knees, and only recently learned to stand again. The quiet comfort of companionship each day gives new life to small doses of happiness. They have become two legs of a triangle, running up to meet in a vertex.

Every small flutter of his hand against her forehead is teaching her silently that in order to make a life out of ashes the first thing needed is to realize that after destruction not everything is entirely barren or lost.

That in order to be happy after, we must come to terms with before.

**O&O&O&**

One misty autumn morning she walks through Rainbow Valley as the asters are blowing away. She finds the spring by which she always pictures him, and sits for a moment.

_I won't forget you, but you have helped me learn to live, even after you're gone. I'm going to do what you asked of me, and be happy. _After a brief pause she says with the weight of finality, _Goodbye, Walter._

And so, after all this time, she learns how to keep faith.

**A/N**_: I really need to write something that does not have Una, Shirley, or Walter. I should stop trying to write in the early hours of the morning. This so did not turn out the way I wanted it to. Gah. Please review, and give me some good constructive comments. Have a beauteous day! _


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